the maybes and the almosts
for lena pasternak
love your melancholia, dictionaries lie.
Melancholia is a secret we must be careful
not to make into a school. But we can talk and feel it
when we talk and know precisely its philosophical
location but know that if we love it enough to feel it
we can never locate, express, or make it subject to theory.
There are too many words in too many
languages that try to capture it, nostalgia, dor, longing,
ansia, sensucht, verlangen, dolu, bramare,
languir, verlangend, heimleit (add your own), but they
are all masks of nostalgia approved by common agreement
to hide melancholia. And to suppress it. Melancholia
may be deeply asocial, a threat to the state and to science.
Just like the soul in the body melancholia cannot be found
by dissecting the brain. It might show up in imaging
but its presence is so inexplicable it is folded into
a spectrum like a planet far at the edge of the Milky Way,
and handed to psychologists, a gift they do not deserve
and can't afford. Here is a pill that pulls it by the roots.
But some doctors are also poets who revel in second-hand
melancholia they do not deserve but shamelessy steal
to store in their wank-tank. These guys are perverts.
To surrender to melancholia is to reside in a state
between childhood and adolescence: it is both within you
and outside of you. It is a state without alarm clocks
a timeless somewhere where things are permeable
and shadows more consistent than the things projecting them.
When it is in you you are happy to suffer it
and wish to stay as long as its presence permits
but it can leave you suddenly and enter someone else
it can leave you to its neighboring states:
depression, nostalgia, wrecklessness, gibberish
and envy for one who now possesses it and does not see
you seeing it: the person who has taken your melancholia
is walking slowly the other way:
you want to follow him and take it back
even if you must fall in love to reposses it.
It creates an appetite that it will never satisfy
because it fills you when you need it and flees
when you consciously crave it. And if you do recover it
through symbiosis, it's been wrecked, no longer yours.
Melancholia is possessive but it has a nomad imperative:
it belongs to you only but moves on as soon as being-alone
with it is not enough. Then you must steal it back and hide it.
Melancholia is mostly a noun that can turn into a verb
unexpectedly, but is never an adjective. To say "I feel melancholic"
is a sure way to chase it away like a bird who senses a cat.
Yet it is as palpable as an organ and owns a space
that is like Visby or Sibiu, medieval cities that display
their latest layer of beauty superimposed on slaughter.
History is one of the many streams that it gathers
along the watersheds of a long and unknown history
because its food is time. To poets it is as familiar as it is
to that immensity of time between adolescent longing for another
and adolescence itself that populates its sweet torment
with ready-made bodies and scenarios that spring in sweat
and pimples to snake around the guardians of order.
Melancholia is not rebellion, it is the province of every age
but it will not touch a hardened heart. Yet everyone knows it.
Some greet it happily, others fear it.
Yet nobody questions its beauty or fails to enjoy its pain.
You should never hand it voluntarily to psychologists
or to emotional extortionists like sentimental novelists and wedding
photographers. Do not bother to define it with words unless
you speak around it to soften an undercooked duck.
It is unique and personal but universal. It detests jealousy.
Its purpose in your body is unclear unless it is the knowledge
of the certainty of death seen neither as fear or illness.
Melancholia may be death itself in its guise of beauty without pain.
It is yours alone when you are in its grip,
the only thing that is yours. Being born was not your choice.
Living among people is not your choice either,
the placement of others around you is as precise as a military drill.
Melancholia cares nothing about that, it floods you with power.
It is a gentle variety of an ongoing orgasm that fills your body
with eternity, apart from your other bodies at work in the socius.
If you'd always possess its current your wishes would never come true
and your work would make everyone cry. There is a dosage.
Melancholia has seasons: its border between self and world
migrates to another body as easily as wind. Melancholia is its own
border as well as what is on either side of it, including you.
It is timeless but it feeds on your time: you are the source
of its time-food. It is feeding on the milk of your time
and is that emptying of the breast that feels you with
the sweet pain and surrender. Your melancholia is everyone
else's too, it is a generous vampyr. Open to everyone
it is accessible only through its joy in eating time
inside your body. Its mouth is a feeling that draws its keys
from all the senses: a little from the smell of autumn,
a bit of flesh from the first bite of the ripe peach with a drop
of mother's milk in your infant cup. It cares nothing
about language but it gives itself generously to poets.
It doesn't mind being undefinable and elusive, it is always itself.
Melancholia: sweet terror of being alone in a dark alley
in a foreign ciy at twilight when ghosts wake up.
Within the great ineffable surrounding the island
of each one of us death's most beautiful face kisses your self
in the mirror of its longing for the thing you are
supposed to fear. When you are in melancholia
or melancholia is in you, death is consoling, life passes like a film.
visby, november 1st, 2015
The Baltic Center
NOTES: The four temperaments, as per Hippocrates, are: Choleric, Melancholic, Sanguine, and Phlegmatic. Each one is "an excess of humors," as per Galen. Earth is the ruler of Melancholic temperament.
In the modern sense, the secondary definition of Melancholy in Thesaurus.com is close: "sober thoughtfulness, pensiveness." (The first is, of course, "depression," and the archaic third is worse, "too much black bile."
We had a radical revisionist discussion last night. My poem gets only fragments.